Do the Right Thing or Traitor to His Class

Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America

Author: Mike Huckabe

Part campaign memoir, part manifesto, this book lays out Mike Huckabee's down-to-earth, optimistic vision for America's future.

Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Author: H W Brands

A sweeping, magisterial biography of the man generally considered the greatest president of the twentieth century, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Traitor to His Class sheds new light on FDR's formative years, his remarkable willingness to champion the concerns of the poor and disenfranchised, his combination of political genius, firm leadership, and matchless diplomacy in saving democracy in America during the Great Depression and the American cause of freedom in World War II.

Drawing on archival materials, public speeches, personal correspondence, and accounts by family and close associates, acclaimed bestselling historian and biographer H. W. Brands offers a compelling and intimate portrait of Roosevelt’s life and career.

Brands explores the powerful influence of FDR’s dominating mother and the often tense and always unusual partnership between FDR and his wife, Eleanor, and her indispensable contributions to his presidency. Most of all, the book traces in breathtaking detail FDR’s revolutionary efforts with his New Deal legislation to transform the American political economy in order to save it, his forceful—and cagey—leadership before and during World War II, and his lasting legacy in creating the foundations of the postwar international order.

Traitor to His Class brilliantly captures the qualities that have made FDR a beloved figure to millions of Americans.

The Washington Post - Lynne Olson

Brands, a professor of history and government at the University of Texas who has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson, offers few new facts about Roosevelt's life or the complexities of his character. What he does do—and does well—is to explain in detail how this ambitious Hudson Valley patrician, the coddled son of an elderly father and dominating mother, managed to defy his family and social class and become the most reform-minded president in U.S. history. The best part of Brands's book is his vivid account of FDR's early life and pre-presidential career.

Publishers Weekly

It is unfortunate for University of Texas historian Brands (Andrew Jackson) that his serviceable biography of Franklin Roosevelt comes on the heels of Jean Smith's magisterial Francis Parkman Prize winner, FDR(2007). Still, Brands provides an entirely adequate narrative detailing the well-known facts of Roosevelt's life. We have the young Knickerbocker aristocrat somewhat tentatively entering the dog-eat-dog world of local Democratic politics in New York's Hudson Valley. We have him embarking on a marriage with his cousin Eleanor that was fated to be politically successful but personally disastrous. We also have the somewhat spoiled son of privilege facing the first real battle of his life-polio-and emerging with greatly enhanced fortitude and empathy. Appropriately, Brands gives two-thirds of his book to FDR's presidency and its two most dramatic events: the domestic war against devastating economic depression (fought with tools that many in America's upper classes considered socialist), and the international war against Axis power aggression. It is fitting that Roosevelt commands the amount of scholarly attention that he does, but sad that so much is wholly redundant with what has come before. 16 pages of photos. (Nov. 4)

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William D. Pederson - Library Journal

According to the rankings of most scholars, FDR is the greatest American President of the 20th century. Brands (Univ. of Texas, Austin; Andrew Jackson) helps us understand why. Bringing his historical and biographical skills to the task of sifting through a huge number of earlier books on FDR, he provides a broad yet nuanced overview. Though Brands does not break new ground, neither does he sensationalize the more controversial aspects of FDR's personality and politics-contrary to what the subtitle might suggest. Rather, FDR is presented as a man who, in mapping his own career, relied heavily on the political career of Theodore Roosevelt and learned from the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he served. The President's ordeal with polio tested and matured him so that he was ready to inspire a crippled nation during the Great Depression. Though he would blunder in the 1937 Supreme Court packing plan, which Brands labels "the biggest mess of his presidency," by 1942 he is considered by Brands to have been "the most powerful man in American history." The overall portrayal here reinforces the views presented in two first-rate recent biographies: conservative journalist Conrad Black's Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and liberal political scientist Jean Edward Smith's FDR. All three are very readable and necessary for a full appreciation of America's 26th president. Highly recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ7/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Prolific historian Brands (History/Univ. of Texas; The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War Over the American Dollar, 2006, etc.) turns his well-honed biographer's eye to FDR.

Although the progressive administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had chipped away at the excesses of capitalism, no peacetime executive in American history attempted to wield power as fully as FDR. Upon taking office in 1932 and facing a worldwide economic depression, he pledged to ask Congress "for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power…as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." Brands focuses on Roosevelt's bold, persistent, not always successful New Deal experimentation to save capitalism from itself and to preserve democracy. Born into every conceivable advantage, FDR—particularly after his midlife polio affliction—became the unlikely tribune of the common man, earning the scorn of those wary of veiled socialism and, later, as war loomed, those fearful of dangerous international entanglements. Brands considers Roosevelt's career (which roughly mimicked his cousin Theodore's) at every stage—state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, vice presidential candidate, governor—but devotes most of the narrative to his unprecedented four-term presidency. By the time it ended, Roosevelt had so transformed the office and the country that not even his fiercest critics dared attempt to roll back the change. The author explains the birth of that era and how the vast expansion of the federal government and executive power was attributable to the imagination, discipline, drive and, to the greatfrustration of his enemies, popularity of the 20th century's most consequential president. Even though Brands's evenhanded treatment—he's forthright about FDR's inveterate duplicity, his overreaching and his gobbling up of the personal and professional lives of those closest to him—fails to add much new information, his book will likely be the go-to popular biography for quite some time.

A thoroughly readable, scrupulously fair assessment of the one president who could inspire a Mt. Rushmore makeover.

Agent: Jim Hornfischer/Hornfischer Literary Management